Representatives Steve King and Michelle Bachman walk to the House chamber for a procedural vote at the Capitol. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Republicans in the House of Representatives were on Friday resuscitating symbolic legislation to help deal with the current surge of unaccompanied minors streaming over the US’s southern border, after the bullish conservative faction in the party reasserted its power over the leadership.

The legislation looked dead Thursday afternoon, when the House’s Republican leaders were forced to cancel a vote after Tea Party-aligned members withdrew their support.

A rewritten bill, along with a second, accompanying piece of legislation intended as a gesture of protest at President Barack Obama’s leniency toward undocumented migrants, will be put to a vote later on Friday.

Neither bill has a realistic chance of becoming law. The White House threatened to veto the less hardline version of the House bill to deal with child migrants, who are fleeing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

The Senate, which failed to pass its own, Democrat-led legislation to cope with the surge in the children, is no longer in session.

The Republican House measure is therefore a purely political move, designed to enable representatives to tell voters they took action on the border crisis – and to claim, counter to the media narrative, that progress was actually blocked by Democrats.

Congress had been due to leave Washington for a five-week recess late on Thursday, however concern among the rank-and-file, many of whom did not want to return to their districts unable to say they had attempted to do something about the so-called border crisis, forced leaders to extend the session and rewrite the legislation.

On Friday morning, after the latest in a string of crisis meetings held in the basement of the Capitol building by the Republican conference, the right-wing contingent that forced the showdown emerged triumphant.

“What happened between last night and this morning has been absolutely remarkable,” said representative Michele Bachmann, the former presidential candidate from Minnesota. She called the vote on the bills, which all parties acknowledged were extremely unlikely to progress after passing the House, “arguably the most monumental vote that we will take in this entire term”.

“It is dealing with the issue that the American people care about more than any other: that is, stopping the invasion of illegal foreign nationals into our country.”

Bachmann said she was among the “vote no coalition” who met with Republican leaders late Thursday to make clear their demands. “We effectively gutted yesterday’s bill. It is a brand new bill. We are going to be sending a message to the Central American countries.”

In a press conference on Friday, Obama called the House bill “the most extreme and unworkable version of a bill that they already know is going nowhere”.

“They’re not even trying to solve the problem,” he said of his Republican opponents. “This is a message bill that they couldn’t even pass yesterday so they made it a little more extreme so they could pass it today.”

He added that while Congress is in recess he would need to make “tough choices” in order to deal with immigration – a reference to possible expansion of action he has previously taken on his own, without Congress’ input.

In recent weeks, repeated efforts had been made to pare down and modify the legislation to placate the rebellious conservatives in the party. Obama had asked for $3.7bn to deal with the crisis, but the package now likely to pass authorises only around $700m.

The version of the legislation rejected by conservatives on Thursday amended a 2008 anti-trafficking law that affords legal protections to children from countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala who wish to apply for refugee status.

However that was not enough for some conservatives, and the new version will go even further, effectively eliminating the distinction afforded to children from those three countries, and treating them like migrants from Mexico, who can be immediately repatriated.

“It treats the ‘other than Mexicans’ the same as Mexican,” representative Steve King, from Iowa, said. “The other bill didn’t do that. It added another appeals process [for children seeking asylum]. This cleans it up.”

He said the bill would also prohibit “unaccompanied alien children” who are looked after in the US from being placed in the custody of families who may themselves be undocumented migrants. Another amendment will see funds for the National Guard provided directly to states, so troops can reinforce border patrol authorities who say they are overwhelmed.

The second bill – which is only included in the package as a sweetener for conservatives – seeks to undo Obama’s executive order to defer the deportation of children brought to the US illegally by their parents, known as Dreamers.

However, caving to the demands of conservatives, leadership is allowing that bill to be rewritten, sources in the meeting said, to adopt language used by Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee representative loyal to the Tea Party movement.

A similar piece of legislation, authored by King, was passed last year.

Several top Republican sources indicated they believed both bills would pass, and several conservatives who objected to the bills on Thursday announced after Friday’s meeting that they had changed their mind.

Still, after the disarray of the last 24 hours, no one was willing to risk predicting the outcome of the vote with much certainty.

“I think we’re all together,” said Hal Rogers, the chairman of the appropriations committee, who drafted the initial bill that was roundly rejected by conservatives. “I don’t know if we’re there quite yet but we’ll know pretty soon.”